chromedome

Lots of us here have cooked professionally at some point along the way, and a few still do. It's a great resource for advice and encouragement.

Quaker oats are very common up here, but I've never seen the grits. Probably a regional thing...I'm guessing gallon jugs of molasses are probably harder to find where you live, for example, but every supermarket has them here. Similarly, my California-bred late wife was shocked to find that the liquor stores here carried no more than a dozen kinds of tequila (selection has increased since, but it's still sparse), while the rum shelves spanned 16 feet of wall.

So that's Wednesday night's dinner taken care of...

Wow. I feel a lot happier now about the price of the 5-lb box locally.

Are you looking for one to use in a commercial kitchen, or just at home? Robot Coupe is a good brand, but it's a bulky and costly piece of gear.

Literally? (You just never know, around this place...)

LOL In another forum, I opined once that - if the eventual collapse of our world leaves anyone competent to pronounce an elegy - it would probably boil down to "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

The point of putting a hole in the egg is so the air pocket inside can expand in the heat without blowing out the shell. I don't own an IP or other pressure cooker, but in all likelihood it reverses the process - because you're cooking under pressure - and forces water into the hole, where it causes those irregularities. That's just off-the-cuff theorizing (and I'm only on my first cup of tea) but it seems plausible.

My daughter just moved to a new apartment (the result of a "reno-viction" by her old landlord, but her old place was so vile we welcomed it) and finally had a space to hang her great-grandmother's spice cabinet. The contents of the jars? Well, my grandmother passed away 10 years ago and had stopped cooking some time before that. When I go back there in a couple of weeks, we'll go to Bulk Barn and pick up some fresh stuff to re-fill them with. My grandmother was born in the portentous month of August 1914, and was 93 when she passed away. Her older sister outlived her by 8 months. On my father's side, several of my great-aunts and great-uncles lived into their 90s as well. Both sets of my wife's grandparents were nonegenarians (the last one passed away just a few months ago), so my kids have some pretty robust genes in the pool.

The direct approach! I like it.

Better late than never.

In my uncaffeinated morning brain, that sentence conjured up images of the deer actively farming alongside the FIL...harnessed to a plough, perhaps, or helping cultivate between rows.

Mine's similar. I use lemon juice instead of vinegar and don't sweeten it, and I use either bacon OR raisins but not both in the same batch. Also I don't use the tomatoes, because I like to make enough for a few days at a time and the tomatoes just turn to mush and make the salad sloppy. Also, I'll sometimes substitute cauliflower for up to 1/3 of the broccoli.

You've got time on your side, so you could also just refrigerate the drippings and lift off the cake of congealed fat before dinner. Given my druthers, that's always my Plan A.

Archaeologists have pushed back the date of the earliest known bread to over 14,000 years ago. Gizmodo drew an obvious, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, inference.

When my kids were little, waffles and ice cream were sometimes the hot-weather dinner. Without the kids, sometimes it's just a beer.

Really? I always find it slices better when still cold from the fridge. It's softer at room temp, but doesn't slice as neatly for exactly that reason (at least for me...you may be defter with your slicer).

I've tried that. It turned out my Cuise was too big for the quantities I was working with (it'd be different if I was doing a whole bag at a time, but that's more sifting than I want to deal with) so I used my little spice grinder (aka twirling-blade cheap-ass coffee grinder). That worked well, but only for a tablespoon or two at a time. So...I wound up just using the coarse and fine separately. Not an issue, really, just a bit of a PITA.

FWIW, most - I'd venture to guess almost all - of us have done similar things.

I have the same blue cornmeal in my freezer. It's taking forever to use up, because the inconsistent grind (which apparently is a characteristic of the stone-ground) makes me crazy. I usually sift it into fine and coarse, the fine to bake with and the coarse to cook for polenta. If I use it un-sifted for polenta, it gets stodgy and sticky before the coarse-ground is fully cooked (basically, it takes away that grace period you normally get before the corn starts to stick and scorch). Baked un-sifted, it yields a cornmeal with irritatingly coarse crunchy bits in it that make the finished cornbread tooth-grittingly unpleasant to eat. Pretty, though.

You can grow your own, quite easily. Easily to a fault, in fact...As with mint, the difficulty is to limit how much you grow. Ordinarily they'll be the size of a large "hand" of ginger, and you just snap off the bits you want to cook at a given moment.

As it was explained to me by an Italian friend, coarse yellow polenta is eaten in the southern parts of Italy, while in the north they favor white corn and a finer grind. He was from the north (Udine, to be precise) and the way he said "finer," with a distinct sniff and tilt of the head, conveyed clearly that in his view the southern variety was not fit for civilized people.

Mine just went in a couple of weeks ago.

Here in New Brunswick, a deer actually got into the provincial legislature building in Fredericton a few years back and caused quite a commotion. In my neighbourhood they seem rather partial to hostas. In a month or so (presumably as other foods become coarser in the late-summer heat) the hostas up and down my street will all have a perfect crew cut, thanks to the deer. Small herds routinely cross the schoolyard opposite my house in the early evening, then look both ways (I kid you not) before crossing the street and continuing down the hill. One morning as my GF's daughter was sitting on the front steps having a coffee and a cigarette, a yearling actually walked right up to her and sniffed at her coffee to see if it was anything interesting. She was pretty freaked out. My favorite deer moment came about six years ago, when I lived in the pretty little resort town of St. Andrews. It was December, and I watched in some amusement as a small herd of deer wandered the streets rubbernecking at the Christmas decorations, for all the world like the busloads of tourists we'd get in summer.